Tech Desk 
Aug 09, 2025
It appears that something has prompted NASA to advance on-orbit medical care, making it independent from Earth, as it has experimened with a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant which it's reportedly developing in collaboration with Google.
The AI medical assistant, named Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is said to be deep in creation and expected to assist astronauts in diagnosing and treating symptoms when a doctor is unavailable or communication with Earth is interrupted.
CMO-DA has been tested in three scenarios: an ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain, according to TechCrunch.
The development comes as humanity has started exploring farther depths of the universe in search for life beyond Earth.
That said, space exploration firms have started stressing more on the crew's health, particularly given astronauts', aboard the International Space Station (ISS), reliance on real-time communications with Houston, regular cargo deliveries of medicines, and the option for their quick return home after six months.
However, this seems to be on the verge of witnessing a transformaiton soon as NASA along with its partners, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is gearing up for longer-duration missions to the Moon and Mars.
The project is based on a fixed-price Google Public Sector subscription agreement, covering cloud services, application development infrastructure, and model training. NASA retains ownership of the app's source code and has contributed to refining the models.
A team of three physicians, including an astronaut, evaluated the assistant's performance, finding a high degree of diagnostic accuracy: 74% for flank pain, 80% for ear pain, and 88% for the ankle injury.
